A commendable MPYO concert

Benjamin Zander was again on the podium on 25 March 2015. This time he directed the MPYO in Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. The opening piece was meant to be Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante K364. However, with a timing misunderstanding, Zander swapped the two pieces around. The young musicians did not articulate Tchaikovsky's opening march tune (the Fate motif) in the winds sufficiently but things improved as the first movement progressed. The strings played with gusto and passion, but the rest of the orchestra wind and brass players played with less soloistic tendencies.

The solo horn player was superb in his delivery of the gorgeous second movement solo. There were no cracked notes and he played with a warm romantic tone. The Waltz movement was played with a suitably elegant lilt. The speed of the fourth movement was not in the "driving and intense Mravinsky" class. Without the intense and very swift speeds, the symphony's ending took on a more sedate character. However, the audience loved the interpretation and gave the young MPYO players warm applause. Zander obliged the audience with a noble interpretation of Nimrod from Elgar's Enigma Variations.

As Zander had to catch a late flight back to USA, MPO's resident conductor Ciaran McAuley took charge of the second half. McAuley adopted very swift speeds for the Mozart. The 2 soloists, violinist Andrew Ng Wen Hao and violist Danish Mubin had difficulty adapting to the very swift speeds McAuley set and phrasing and expression was severely lacking. Also, despite playing a French violin from the Rin collection, there was difficulty for violinist Andrew Ng to make his solo passages rise above the level of the MPYO. Similarly, violist Danish Mubin did not project his tone firmly as well.

The MPYO is a good work in progress but there are still a lot of improvements that the orchestra can make before they can achieve much higher standards in the years to come.